Ashoka University Launches Bhashavaad: India’s First Open-Access Database of Translations

New Delhi, January 30, 2025: The Ashoka Centre for Translation at Ashoka University, in collaboration with the New India Foundation, launches Bhashavaad, India’s first non-profit, open-access, and crowd-sourced database of Indian translations. Opening with 14,000+ entries, 6,500+ authors, and 7,000+ translators, the aim of the database is to re-energize India’s translation ecosystem with an inventory of demand and supply that is long overdue and extremely valuable for our literary-cultural identity and infrastructure. 
 
As with any living archive, Bhashavaad will improve with time and will be updated with more data and information to support its purpose. It strives to answer questions like what is and what is not being translated, who is publishing translations, who is translating, which languages are most active, what are the most translated language pairs, and many more. With more data being added to the existing searchable database, it will help us understand our multilingual landscape better and also the dynamics between languages, the communities that use them, and the regions they belong to. 
 
Rita Kothari, Co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation and Professor of English at Ashoka University, is credited with extensively translating between Gujarati, Sindhi, English, and Hindi and also for theorizing translation in the Indian context. On the launch of this database, Rita Kothari said, “Bhashavaad, as both an idea and archive, is an attempt to listen to what’s left over, as opposed to what’s lost, in translation. As such, ‘vaad’ is also to speak, stemming from ‘vaach’ in Sanskrit. Bhashavaad, therefore, shares not a concern about ‘isms’ but instead about the active ‘ings’—thinking, reading, writing, translating, and publishing—taking place in the wider Indian literary sphere. This interactive database is as much about making Indian languages speak to each other as it is about reading and listening to them.”
 
Arunava Sinha, Co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation and Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University, with over 90 published translations between Bengali and English, said “the Bhashavaad database can be used to better understand the multilingual landscape of India. Powered by a diverse team of research fellows, academics, student interns, and project leads from different states and towns across India—working on translations from and into languages ranging from Dogri to Dakhni and Maithili to Mundari—it will improve as public users interact with it. This database is a labor of love of all those who are involved in the business of translation, directly or otherwise, many of whom have voluntarily come forward to support us in this endeavor with their suggestions and resources.”
 
In its current shape, Bhashavaad has noted a massive leap between the first 50 years of the 20th century, with 125 translations, and the first 20 years of the 21st century, with 2673 translations. While the database is still evolving toward its goal of mapping the full landscape of Indian translations, this remarkable growth marks a strong and credible beginning. Of the translations listed so far, the top ten translated languages are Bengali (1749), Hindi (1155), and Marathi (887), followed by Tamil, Malayalam, Urdu, Telugu, Kannada, Sanskrit, and Odia. The top five languages that receive translations outside English are Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Bengali, and Telugu. A happy discovery of browsing is the long translations from Manipuri, Maithili, Kodava, Rajbangshi, Mizo, Kokborok, and Bongcher. The top languages for translation from Sanskrit are English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, and Punjabi. 
 
The top publisher of translations is National Book Trust with 2260, closely followed by Sahitya Akademi with 2118. The most prolific translation publishers are Penguin in English, Vani Prakashan in Hindi, Gurjar Grantharatna in Gujarati, DC Books in Malayalam, and Dey’s Publishing in Bengali. The top translated authors include Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Premchand, Amrita Pritam, William Shakespeare, Saadat Hasan Manto, Mahasweta Devi, Jules Verne, and Satyajit Ray. The database throws up delightful translation heroes like Chandrakant Pokale (127 translations from Marathi to Kannada), Ramanlal Soni (83 translations from Bengali and 7 from English to Gujarati), Sudhindranath Raha (65 translations from English and several European languages to Bengali) and Jai Ratan (36 translations from Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi to English).
 
Somak Raychaudhury, Vice-Chancellor, Ashoka University said, “The launch of Bhashavaad marks an important step toward preserving and celebrating India’s rich multilingual heritage. Ashoka University believes in the power of translation to bridge cultures, deepen understanding, and make literary treasures accessible across languages. We believe this open-access database will serve as an invaluable resource for scholars, researchers, readers, and translators, creating a more connected and inclusive literary ecosystem.”
 
The Bhashavaad database will continue to be a growing repository of translations where users, including authors-translators-publishers themselves, can add new entries and correct existing ones. Users will soon have interfaces to add or modify information on their books. As it continues to collect data from catalogues, websites, and library lists, Bhashavaad hopes to lead by building further collaborations with repositories of existing records to provide exhaustive documentation in the form of a living archive of India, and Indian literature, in translation.